I read this and think Bush gets "right to the nub" of an issue because he doesn't care much for details, context, nuance, or history.

Bingo. He's a master of binary argumentation. You're with us or you're with the terrorists. Stay the course, or cut and run. Pro-life or pro-abortion. With Bush, it's not just Luntzian semantics. It's how his mind works.

Once again, the AP delivers...

"And it better not repeat what he already knows."

Well, that's an easy one. Bush has never proved to me or anyone else that he knows his ass from first base.

When it comes to Bush, I have to agree with Frank Rich in the NY Times:

WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

Under The LobsterScope

I would say this piece is sad were it not that I am still too angry over the last eight years! Could care less how, or even if, anyone even remembers his name...all seem willingly able to eventually just forget all he did or did not do to our country...he will benefit from the 15 minutes of attention our media (and even some historians) give to FACTUAL recollection of events. This "he's really a nice guy" will work because it is all about the cult of personality here in 'Merica...I do not expect Obama to have much of a "honeymoon" given the nature and behavior of our media...how long, btw, before we are innundated with stories about the pathetic runs of Chris Matthews and Terry McCauliffe (?)...the beginning of the death of DEMS...???

He will find a vile reason to stay in the public eye. He's in good shape. He will live a long time. He will shame us with the memory of how he was allowed to be president, for many years to come. He will be like some idiotic pop tune that came out years ago, which was annoying and stupid then and annoying and stupid down through the decades as you hear the same annoying and stupid tune over and over again in restaurants and grocery stores as a blight upon your life and time.

This will be our George. Close to us always. Time and again some callow reporter will think to call up the old man and ask him what he thinks. And it will be repeated. Someone out there will go on loving him and trying to get us to love him. Deluded historians and bankrupt moralists. And we will be asked to hear that dangerous and cheerful maniac all over again spewing his joyful willful ignorance.

He will never go away. He is part of us. He is America.

I agree with Digby. I read that description of Bush's personality and thought to myself, "I can't stand guys like that." But the author seemed to have regarded this description as saying positive things about him.

I'm reminded of this Point/Counterpoint from The Onion.

It is time for an institution of higher learning to create a research library for 'Outlaw USA Administrations' to offer balance to the hagiographic presidential lie-braries. I don't doubt that small donations would flow to this project from around the world.

Could do worse than check out "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder" by Vincent Bugliosi for a refreshing dose of real reality. Poor Schrub, scraping the barrel with not a bolt-hole in sight.

whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell

My favorite was Timothy Bottoms who played Bush as a buffoon in "That's My Bush" and as a hero in the propaganda docudrama "DC 9/11". Now that's versatility.

He will never go away. He is part of us. He is America.

Does this mean there won't be a movie twenty years from now? What a relief!

Oh, there'll be a movie: It's just that the major villain will be Dick Cheney, and the screenwriter's challenge will be to make Cheney seem like a believable character and not a comic book supervillain.

Bush is nice to his toadies? BFD. Hitler was nice to his dog. He had favorites. Oh, and I assume he ran a good meeting.

What matters are actions, consequences, effects in the real world. And in every single area of public life, national and international, Bush has been a disaster. Historians will judge Bush on this record. And this is why he's on a course to win "Worst President Ever" hands down.

This is what I call the Wizard of Oz defense. Dorothy says to the wizard "I think you are a very bad man.� He responds by saying “I'm really a very good man; but I'm a very bad Wizard.�

The only difference is that Bush and his sycophants myopically see only the “good man� part, whereas the rest of the world sees the “bad wizard/president� part.

"He will never go away"

Yeah, he will become the permanent Grand Marshal for the Christmas Adolphus Nieman-Marcus Toy. In a more Northern Parade than this Dallas one, he could have be relegated to a float where he reads "My Pet Goat" or asides from his fav "One Hour Bible". Or perhaps enacting "The Grinch Who Stole our Constitution". But, I would prefer to see him reenacting Chuckles the Clown from "MTM", dressing up as a peanut, and being shucked whole by a rogue elephant.

I used to work with kids that were "challenged". Average IQ of about 70 or so.

They were ALWAYS happy!

In sessions with policy experts, Bush tends to ask questions that get right to the nub of a sticky issue. His top aides speak regretfully about how the country never got to see that side of him, even after all this time.

Oh, sure. Don’t you have to know a good bit about a sticky issue to even be able to perceive the nub? Does it not involve some hard work? Effort? Patience? An open and determined mind? And if you want to ask questions to get to that nub, don’t you need a pretty good command of language, logic, and conversational skills?

I’ve never seen these characteristics in Bush and I’ve never managed to work up any explanation for why anybody voted for him a second time in 2004.

Looking for clues as to what George W. Bush really believes, I thought it was a bit of a Freudian slip that Bush told his last two chiefs of staff -- Bolton and Card -- that he did not want either to think of themselves as "prime ministers." That Bush would describe his chiefs of staff as "prime ministers," even in negative terms, means that Bush at some level thinks of himself as a "king."

Mensch in Chief????

I always thought the term mensch meant "man" in the best sense of the term. The sort of person who is naturally honorable and takes responsibility for his actions.

This is not George II. He has a long history of dropping in, making messes, and leaving them for others to clean up.

A mensch he is not.

And it better not repeat what he already knows.

Gad... don't envy the guy writing up the agendas.

How can one know?
I suppose you assume he knows everything that's been said and just wait for him to ask for a reminder hoping he's not too embarrassed to admit his ignorance?

Hey... wait... that would explain a lot of the past 8 years.

The Kinks wrote a shorter version of this AP piece 43 years ago. (And set it to music, of course.) The main difference is, Ray Davies & Co. were doing intentional satire:

'Cause he gets up in the morning,
And he goes to work at nine,
And he comes back home at five-thirty,
Gets the same train every time.
'Cause his world is built 'round punctuality,
It never fails.

And he's oh, so good,
And he's oh, so fine,
And he's oh, so healthy,
In his body and his mind.
He's a well respected man about town,
Doing the best things so conservatively.

"I’ve never managed to work up any explanation for why anybody voted for him a second time in 2004."
little ole jim on January 4, 2009 at 10:08 AM

You're not alone. Neither can most Democratic pols -- esp the Congressional "leadership" ("Congressional Democratic leadership" is my 2nd-favorite oxymoron) -- nor their counsultants and operatives. That explains a lot about both the last 8 years, and what we're likely to experience of the next 4 to 8.

Here's a hint: "He kept us safe."

(No, of course I know this is not true, as do most readers here. Anyone with a 3-digit IQ knows this. But the average American IQ is 100. Do the math. And it didn't help that the legacy media, for their own reasons, heavily promoted the lie.)

In sessions with policy experts, Bush tends to ask questions that get right to the nub of a sticky issue.

Such as: "Hey, ya'll want barbecue for lunch? Let's do barbecue for lunch. I can have it flown in from Dallas. Damn, presidentin' is fun!"

'Hadley also emphasized his "personal qualities," insisting, "[O]ne thing he is not is arrogant.""

Like a glimmer of self could emerge anywhere near that Black Hole of ego.

Just reading through these and other bloggers' comments, it occurs to me that once Bush is gone there will be a huge outpouring of anger--along with relief--over what has happened to our country the past eight years. Anger at Bush and the complicit Congress and media. I think this anger will be unprecedented and real and will need an outlet of some sort...

Part of this reads like every business-page puff piece on every bad boss I've ever known. Comes into a meeting knowing what he wants to be told. The only use of such meetings is to make surreptitious lateral communication while Mr. Take-charge is getting his hand job.
F. Scott Fitzgerald nailed it: "The rich are different: they expect to be loved."
George Bush is the exactly like dozens of spoiled rich kids, who realize they don't have to know things, or know how to do things, or work, or be nice--they have a ton of money and their daddy's powerful. They expect love all the time, and regardless of their actions.
Fortunately, they're why American dynasties never last more than a couple of generations. But they wreak untold damage while they're fucking things up.

I was very impressed with his resting heart rate. It was about the same as his presidential number, 43, I think.

If he's the mean ex-husband, can we get a restraining order on him?

"In sessions with policy experts, Bush tends to ask questions that get right to the nub of a sticky issue. His top aides speak regretfully about how the country never got to see that side of him, even after all this time."

And whose word is it we're trusting on this statement? In those meetings that have been attended by outsiders or that have had videotapes released, Bush has been remarkably incurious, not asking ANY questions.

I'm sure the Repubs hope he vanishes.

Well, here's to hoping he stays around as the living douche bag to remind us all of just how screwed up and depraved our country becomes when the Repubs are "the deciders".

I wish they'd stop referring to him as a Texan, which conjures up images of some sort of Marlborough-man, don't-talk-like-a-collitch-perfesser, get 'er done personality. He's a Texan by residence only, and grew up in Connecticut. There's no regional genetic excuse for him to be as stupid as he is, and not a lot of big cattle drives to Abilene go through Connecticut. But suggesting he's a Texan just somehow makes him sound more like a Washington anachronism and more mavericky, which he isn't.

Good thing they didn't measure his resting alpha-wave rate, which probably looks quite a bit like Elvis's. Right now, I mean.

It's kind of pitiful, the way they keep trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Bush was an idiot, who miraculously rose to the country's highest office despite so many unsuitable qualities that it's a little like making James Inhofe a senator. Oh, wait....perhaps that's not the best example. Anyway, the legacy project that would most adequately describe his tenure would be a comedy - perhaps, "The Butterfinger Chronicles" or "Hold my Bourbon, and Watch This". He provided an embarrassment of riches, or perhaps a richness of embarrassment for comedians.

By a weird twist of fate, I shook Bush's hand in the White House. Granted I can't look into someone's soul the way he can, but I can say that his entire demeanor is exactly the same as some of my best friends from my college fraternity. Unfortunately, that is an incredibly backhanded compliment, since I definitely would not trust the majority of them with running a nation.

Dale wrote: "I was very impressed with his resting heart rate. It was about the same as his presidential number, 43, I think."

Throw in his IQ and you have a trifecta.

Forrest Gump without the good luck. That was a crappy movie, too.

He made the drains run on time.

What a legacy, eh?